Why is inflation so much lower and at the same time more stable in developed economies in the 1990s, compared with the 1970s? This paper suggests that the United Kingdom, United States and other countries may have escaped from a volatile inflation equilibrium. Our argument builds on the story...

Why has inflation been so stable in developed economies since the early 1990s? In this paper, we answer that the United States and other countries may have escaped from a volatile inflation equilibrium. Our argument builds on the story proposed by Tom Sargent in "The Conquest of American...

The volatility of inflation and output has fallen in most advanced economies in the 1990s and 2000s. We use a monetary overlapping generations model to discuss the cause and durability of this macroeconomic change. In that model, agents' decision rules require them to make forecasts of future...

This paper reports an investigation of the effects of additive and multiplicative uncertainty upon the stabilisation properties of a simple base money rule for monetary policy. Using a five-equation empirical model of the United Kingdom, it is shown that changes in the extent of additive...

This paper outlines some problems with the methods often used to construct measures of real 'disequilibria' or 'gaps' (eg the output gap) and to examine their relationship with inflation. It then offers a structural vector autoregression alternative which is used to construct estimates of...

Although the target of monetary policy is clear, there have been suggestions that the conduct of monetary policy is improved by monitoring trimmed mean inflation rates, the mean of some central portion of the distribution of price changes. This paper assesses critically the theoretical and...